Craftsmanship.
& he worked for hours & days & weeks, selecting & editing & working, shaping the audio into a cohesive whole, picking & choosing clips, & not necessarily clips that he likes but clips that are important to him. Clips of them laughing & clips of them smiling & clips of them just being together & in a lot of these clips you can’t actually hear much but he knows the significance & she’ll know too & that’s what counts.
When he’s done picking the audio it comes out to something like sixty minutes & he thinks about it & decides that he really doesn’t need all twelve minutes of that night that she cried into his shoulder about how scared she was for Kevin - he only needs the last thirty seconds, really - so that brings it down to just over fifty, which is much easier to live with.
He wonders about how to get it to her - he considers a USB drive but no, that’s much too impersonal. CDs are too ugly. Records are too big, & he doesn’t have the resources to press vinyl anyway. Nothing seems right. Eventually he converts the MP3 files into binary & writes it all into a series of notebooks - it takes a few weeks & four or five notebooks, but he eventually transcribes the entire sequence of ones & zeros & that’s the end of that ordeal. He draws pictures in the margins & writes little notes to her in the headers - messages & images that only she will understand. He also gives it to her on a tape, for posterity.
